Chris Barsanti's Blog, page 124
July 13, 2016
TV Room: ‘The Night Of’
Riz Ahmed in ‘The Night Of’ (HBO)
Along-in-development, eight-episode miniseries,The Night Ofhas the heft and snap of that rare crime novel which seems to have been written by somebody who has actually talked to a few cops and crooks in their time. That’s because it’s written by Richard Price, whose gritty, funny novels fromThe Wanderers toThe Whites provide a kind of alternate history of New York.
What’s it about? In short, a good kid from Queens (Riz Ahmed) goes out when he shouldn’t, hangs...
July 11, 2016
TV Room: ‘O.J.: Made in America’
ESPN’s “30 for 30” series has been responsible for some of the better sports-themed documentaries of recent years (Peter Berg’s King’s Ransom, on the trade of Wayne Gretzky to Los Angeles; Ron Shelton’sJordan Rides the Bus, in which Michael Jordan retires from the NBA to play minor-league baseball) by understanding a simple rule: Sports stories get more interesting the further afield they run from the sport in question.
Ezra Edelman’s sprawling five-part epicO.J.: Made in Americafollows that...
July 10, 2016
Writer’s Desk: Elie Wiesel
Elie Wiesel, the concentration-camp survivor and immortal author who passed away this past week at 87 years old, was a writer for many reasons. Firstly, after being liberated from Buchenwald as a teenager and having no family left, Wiesel needed to do something to survive.
In the postwar years, he started working as a journalist when only 19 years old. His searing account of his concentration-camp experiences,Night, was first published in Yiddish in 1955 and later translated into multiple lan...
July 9, 2016
Reader’s Corner: Women and the New Noir
It used to be that mysteries were a particularly men-centric corner of the publishing world. You had your Agatha Christie and later on Janet Evanovich and Patricia Cornwell. But while those authors could sell in the millions, the authors that many literary types preferred tended toward the male: Raymond Chandler and the like.
But more recently, in the post-Gone Girl era, that seems to have changed. Not only do female readers appear to be taking up more of the audience, and women authorsoccupy...
July 8, 2016
Weekend Reading: July 8, 2016
July 3, 2016
Writer’s Desk: Be Productive
It sounds counter-intuitive, but the more you write, the better your odds become.
Anton Chekhov understood this. His advice:
Write as much as you can!Write write write till your fingers break!
Chekhovwrote over 700 novellas and other short pieces, not to mention a few of the most enduring works of theater ever written.
So, what are you waiting for? Get to it. Write!
July 2, 2016
Reader’s Corner: Tolkien on the Battlefield
In 1916, a 24-year-old J.R.R. Tolkien went off to fight for his country. He arrived in France just as the Battle of the Somme was about to erupt. At the end of the first day of fighting, almost 20,000 British soldiers were dead. The butchery went on for months. It would be a transformative experience for the young scholar.
Joseph Loconte writes in theTimes thatTolkien actually started writingThe Lord of the Rings by candlelight at the front.It’s not hard to see the inspiration of the Somme’s...
July 1, 2016
Weekend Reading: July 1, 2016
June 30, 2016
Screening Room: ‘The BFG’
The BFG,Steven Spielberg’s adaptation of Roald Dahl’s 1982 children’s classic about the big friendly giant with the great ears and knack for catching dreams, opens this week.
My review is at PopMatters.
June 26, 2016
Writer’s Desk: It Beats Working, or Does It?
The late David Carr (Night of the Gun) was the kind of writer who reminded writers why they loved their jobs. He suffered for the job, but also thought it was a blast, and tore poseurs to pieces.
Here’s Carrbeing interviewed by a magazine at Boston University, where he taught a class:
The dirty secret: journalism has always been horrible to get in; you always have to eat so much crap to find a place to stand. I waited tables for seven years, did writing on the side. If you’re gonna get a job...
